Explicitation and (In)directness in Literary Translations from Japanese into English and Romanian: A Contrastive Analysis

A complex process that necessarily goes beyond the surface level of words and phrases, (literary) translation is also a means to understand the cultures whose products the translated texts are. In this article, I look at the English and the Romanian translations of two Japanese novels in an attempt to identify those elements that prove that the texts carry the load of the specific type of culture that both the translators and the readers belong to. More specifically, I analyse the way in which the discourse is reconstructed in English and Romanian in light of Edward T. Hall’s high-context culture vs. low-context culture distinction. This article does not focus on the translation of culture-specific realities, as is the case with most studies that compare textual products belonging to different cultures, but on the way in which ordinary realities are rendered in English and Romanian. I look at the degree to which the context created by the Japanese authors is explicitly specified and the level of directness of the discourse in the two languages, as representative features of the high-context vs. low context cultures dichotomy. The examples analysed here suggest that the English translations tend to employ more strategies for an explicit specification of the context and to create a more direct discourse than the Romanian ones, which is consistent with the fact that English is a language considered typical of low-context culture spaces. Romanian translations are generally closer to the Japanese original, showing a more high-context culture perspective, confirming the existence of a continuum between the two extreme ends in Hall’s dichotomy.